Saturday 12 November 2005 19.29 EST
First published on Saturday 12 November 2005 19.29 EST

Six weeks into his stint as supposed 'caretaker' managing director of the London Evening Standard, Bert Hardy, one of the few people who really deserves the title 'Fleet Street veteran', is having the time of his 76-year life.

'I don't see it so much as being a caretaker, but I certainly intend to take care of the paper. I've been going at it at a fair old speed, though, just in case a more permanent person comes in,' he says. If he carries on like he has begun, he will present his immediate bosses - Paul Dacre and Lord Rothermere - with an interesting problem.

Because, almost unnoticed, Hardy has reversed the trend of falling circulation at the influential London evening paper. And in the past fortnight the decline has not just been halted but turned around.

Hardy has used the oldest trick in the book - a cover price cut - to attract readers back to the Standard. For the past two weeks, the cover price each Tuesday has been halved to 20p, and the results have been immediate and impressive.

The ABC average for the month of October was 296,000, but on the last Tuesday in the month it hit a low of 263,000. Against this base, Hardy's price-cut has seen sales jump by 35 per cent on the first Tuesday of November, and by 37 per cent the following week.

Of course, the crucial question is how much of that rise will 'stick' as regular readers, but here too the evidence so far is that it has worked. On the Wednesday following '20p Tuesday', sales were up 20 per cent, and were still ahead, by 6.5 per cent, at the end of the week.

'We wanted to give readers an incentive to try the Standard again, and it seems to be working. We want to reduce bulks and increase the paid-for element, which has been falling. So far, so good,' says Hardy.

The target is an audited figure of around 410,000, he says, made up of fully paid and bulks with the giveaway Lite edition added in. There are currently around 70,000 Lite copies distributed in central London each day.

Hardy's intervention comes at a crucial time for the paper. The editor, Veronica Wadley, will have been in the chair for four years next January, and she has done much to improve the Standard. Under her patron, Dacre, she has recruited big-name columnists, given the pages a more feminine feel, and focused more on social and lifestyle issues. But the transformation did not do enough to reverse the decline in readership.

Hardy - who has seen it all in his 60-odd year career in newspapers and television, and has twice fought off cancer - was called back to full-time work after the departure of Mike Anderson. Whoever described Hardy's role as 'caretaker' should have known better: he took up the baton with relish, and shows little sign of wanting to hand it over. 'The Standard has changed a lot this year, but it hasn't gone far enough in my view. It needs to change more,' he says.

He has imposed a 64-page edition limit, moved away from low-rate (or even free) advertising, and, after consultation with the agencies, changed display and classified sales methods. 'We will not go above 64 pages unless it's paid for by advertising,' says Hardy, pointing out proudly that last Friday the paper ran to 80 pages with full colour pages of corporate display ads.

The advertising moves have coincided with a change of editorial pace, which Hardy wants to accelerate further: 'We've changed the flow so that there is much more news up front. An evening paper lives by its news coverage, and we have to reflect that. I want a run that goes from news to business, the features and entertainment and then sport at the back. We've moved towards that and I think it's paying off.'

He has changed the business pages back from pink to white newsprint, which he concedes is 'a shame' but claims it inhibited the news flow too much, and has hired big-name commentators for business, to complement the high profile columnists in news.

Sports coverage is vital, says Hardy, and - as a keen racing man himself - he wants to lure horseracing readers into the pages. The morning daily card has been dropped from the early editions, and instead the Standard supplies all the other papers' morning tips.

On his commitment to the Standard, Hardy says: 'For me, it's open-ended.' Let's see whether Dacre and Lord Rothermere agree.